It’ll do you good to get a big, dark shelter dog
I met A2163420 a dozen years ago in August.
A Chandler police dog named Bandit had just died — accidentally left in his handler’s patrol car at the end of their shift — and the community was grieving.
Thousands mourned Bandit’s passing. Hundreds attended his memorial service, a vigil organized by strangers who were touched by his story.
On the day of Bandit’s service, I went to one of Maricopa County’s animal shelters. That’s where I met A2163420.
Sixty-three dogs would be put to death in Maricopa County that day — unwanted, unloved, unnoticed. Many of them started out as adoptable but they can’t wait forever.
It’s almost as if the dogs know the clock’s ticking. If you’ve ever been to the pound, you know what I mean.
As you walk the rows of cages, dozens of dogs demonstrate their marketing expertise. They bark excitedly and jump up as you pass. If they could talk, they’d be saying, “Pick me! Pick me!”
Then there are the other ones. The ones that don’t even lift a head as you pass by but follow you with their eyes — the ones that have been waiting too long for someone who never comes. The ones like A2163420.
On the day I was there, she was the longest-running resident of the shelter, brought in three weeks earlier after being found running loose in Avondale. She had no collar but was spayed, so she had once belonged to somebody.
On her kennel was a pink heart and a sign. “I can go home today,” it said.
Only no one stops to look at a twoor three-year-old dog like A2163420. She had a fatal malady. The shelter people called it “Big Brown Dog Syndrome.”
“She’s black, she’s large. She’s plain,” one worker explained. “No one wants a big brown or black dog.”
She didn’t say it, but I knew A2163420’s days were numbered.
So I wrote about her, one of a thousand dogs waiting in the Valley’s animal shelters.
Janelle and Steven Berger read it. They weren’t looking to get a dog. In
fact, there were all kinds of reasons not to get a dog: white carpet, an upcoming trip to China and besides, they already had one, a rescue they’d gotten in Chicago.
But Janelle took one look at the newspaper picture of A2163420 and well, that was that. She called her clients to reschedule the day’s appointments — she’s an esthetician — and headed down to the shelter on South 27th Avenue.
“I instantly fell in love with her,” Janelle told me recently. “She was so excited.”
Turns out the dog that followed people with her eyes while her fellow inmates wriggled with delight was a great dog.
Part lab, part pit bull — big, big part people dog.
Jane, as she became known, went on to live the good life in Scottsdale with the Bergers, off the streets and onto a dog bed with the occasional snooze on an antique sofa. And a funny thing happened because of that big, black dog.
She gave as well as she got. She became family.
“Just a sweet, kind, loving, beautiful dog,” Janelle told me recently. “She’s given us good love. She’s meant a lot to me.”
Janelle called me because she knew a parting was to come. And it did, a few weeks later.
If all dogs must go in heaven, Janelle is hoping Jane’s story might first give another dog a shot at a good life here on earth.
As Bandit’s story once did.
She’s hoping someone might take a second look at a big, black (or brown) dog.
There are plenty of Janes to be had.
“We are desperate for adopters right now. We have nearly 900 animals between the two facilities right now. We’re doing everything we can to keep them healthy and adoptable which becomes more difficult the more crowded we get.” Jose Santiago
Spokesman, Maricopa County Animal Care and Control
“We are desperate for adopters right now,” Jose Santiago, spokesman for Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, told me. “We have nearly 900 animals between the two facilities right now. We’re doing everything we can to keep them healthy and adoptable which becomes more difficult the more crowded we get.”
These days, the pound takes in 80 to 100 dogs a day but here’s the good news. Shelter dogs have a far better shot at survival now than they did in Jane’s day. Just 4% of those who come in to Maricopa County’s two animal shelters are euthanized — mostly due to bad health or severe aggression.
The rest — those 900 as well as 1,450 at the Arizona Humane Society – are waiting. Dogs like Jane — Santiago calls them the “blackie-headed whatevers” — will wait the longest.
Dogs like Cinnabunny and Ileesa and Craig, who has been at the shelter for three months now.
Dogs like Abby and Brenda and Holstein, who lives to chase a ball.
Dogs very much like A2163420.
“She,” Janelle said, “was loved.”
With Maricopa County Animal Care and Control’s Mesa shelter quarantined until at least Saturday due to an outbreak of distemper, there is a critical need for adoptions to free up space at the west side shelter in Phoenix. The shelter, at 2700 E. 27th Ave., opens at 11 a.m. for adoptions and is open until 6 p.m. (5 p.m. on weekends).
For more information, check out maricopa.gov/ 214/Adopt-a-Pet.